UNIT 2. INTERACTIONAL SOCIOLINGUISTICS Flashcards
What is Contextualization? Explain Slembrouk’s perspective.
It refers to the understanding of context as something made in the course of interaction and of which its construction depends on inferential practices in accordance with conventions which speakers may or may not share.
What is Gumperz’s concept of contextualization cue?
Any verbal sign which serves to construct the contextual ground for situated interpretations, and thereby affects how constituent messages are understood.
Give some examples of contextualization cues.
1) Intonation
2) Code-switching (alternating two or more languages or varieties of them)
3) Style-switching (shifting as a response to social conditions)
4) Lexical or syntactic choices
5) Facial and gestural signs
What do we mean when we say that contextualization cues function indexically?
That they’re deictic, although they aren’t necessarily lexically based.
What is the concept of FRAME?
The different ways through which social actors organize their experience in terms of recognizable activities (e.g.: a meeting, a lecture, a card game).
How is framing activity socially situated?
By FOOTING
What is Goffman’s concept of FOOTING?
It relates to a speaker’s shifting alignments in relation to the events at hand. Which brings the need to distinguish the different speaker roles a speaker can shift into.
What are the main speaker roles a speaker can shift into?
1) Animator: The participant that produces the talk, producer.
2) Author: The one that creates the talk, creator.
3) Figure: The one that is portrayed by talk.
4) Principal: The one that is responsible for talk.
What are four of the best-known approaches to the phenomenon of politeness?
1) The social-norm view
2) The conversational-maxim view
3) The face-saving view
4) The conversational-contract view
What is Goffman’s concept of FACE?
Goffman argues that the self is a social construction, and our way of viewing the self as a social and interactive construction is through the notion of FACE. Speakers try to maintain face and that’s how they interact. Society cues help not only to see what aspects would be positive for our FACE personas but also helps distinguish between the self as a social and a personal entity.
What are Brown and Levinson’s concepts of positive and negative face?
It is the most influential view on politeness. It takes Goffman’s notion of face and evolves it by including two sides of the FACE persona:
Positive Face: The desire to be approved of.
Negative Face:The desire to be unimpeded in one’s actions.
And the introduction of Face Threatening Acts
What are the three sociolinguistic variables in a direct relationship with the face of the speaker?
1) Social Distance
2) Relative Power (of speaker and hearer)
3) Ranking of impositions in the particular culture
What is a Face Threatening Act?
An act that intrinsically threaten’s the interlocutor’s face.
Describe Brown and Levinson’s strategies of politeness
1) Positive politeness strategies: Oriented towards the positive face of hearer. They show the speaker’s desire for approval of hearer’s wants.
2) Negative Politeness strategies: Aimed at hearer’s negative face. The speaker’s determination to maintain their terrain and self-determination.
What are Grice’s Maxims?
Quantity, Quality, Relation and Manner
